Helm is terrific. I switched to it from ido in the past 6 months and it's really increased my efficiency. In particular helm + projectile allows me to really quickly switch between projects and navigate to the file I need. I remapped some of the most-used emacs commands to their helm equivalent's and haven't looked back:
My one complaint is getting used to C-z to drill into a directory when navigating the file system with helm-find-files. I haven't et figured out a way to map RET to do anything other than open the selected directory in Dired.
Does TAB not work for you to drill into a directory? I never have to use C-z in helm-find-files, just a simple `C-x f`, type a few characters, TAB expands the directory, and ENTER opens the file or directory.
I've switched from ace-jump to avy with De Bruijn hints; it shows all the hints at once rather than in sequence, even if the hints overlap with one another.
The downside is that, sometimes, the hints are longer, but I've found it faster to know right away to type "wxyz" than to receive "w", "x", then "y" one at a time.
Nobody is going to read this since this post is over a day old, but:
Emacs searches not only ~/.emacs but also ~/.emacs.d/init.el (and probably more) places for its init file. So you don't have to mess around with symlinks, you can just have a synced folder that is your ~/.emacs.d and have init.el be at the top of that folder.
This is a nice intro guide to emacs, but I think it goes without saying that if your CEO decides to learn emacs from scratch, you are in big trouble.
I say this as a dedicated, daily user of emacs and co-founder of a startup. Realistically it takes a year to get the hang of emacs to the point where you are more efficient in it than in other editors. The last thing I want my CEO (and friend and cofounder) doing is battling a weird Drop symlink issue with his .emacs file.
I don't think it takes that much to be more efficient than in other editors; avy/ace-jump alone already exceeds what I was using before. After mastering basic navigation and learning several other choice plugins such as undo-tree, expand-region, smartparens, evil/spacemacs if you secretly want to learn vim, I could see emacs already being more efficient.
The weird issues and workarounds are annoying, though.
I don't think it goes at all without saying?! Are all CEOs obliged to use MS Office, arguably inferior editing experience to pure text editing, or be doomed to yakshaving their dotfiles?
Unfortunately there is a misconception that you need a 10kloc init.el to be productive. Worse still are the opinionated configurations targeted at newbs.
OP here. It took me about three weeks to get back up to a high level of productivity in Emacs. At the time, I was learning a new keyboard (truly ergonomic) which was the greater challenge. My wrist tendons are thankful to me for those weeks of awkwardness. I think Emacs is wrong for the vast majority of CEOs, but for some (at least one) it's pretty great.
Although I am not a CEO (but a marketer), I have a similar setup using Acme. I do all my note-taking inside Acme and have my plumbing logic set up so that all documents/JIRA issues/etc. are a single click away.
I think there is something to be said about using a few (if not one) text-centric tool to get stuff done: it's much lower on your cognitive load and wears you out less.
I would love to see some of your Acme setup. Emacs and Acme are my two favorite editors, but using Acme is a little less feasible for me due to not having found a proper (3-button + trackball) mouse to use with it. While I was using Acme, though, I did get most of the way there using the mod keys to simulate clicks.
whenever i see a i3 (or similar) setup these days, i keep getting reminded of a Acme demo i viewed. i3 with a bunch of terminals, Acme and Emacs all seem to land on pretty much the same usage scenario via different means.
Jokes aside, text files are a wonderful medium. Not everything can be expressed easily as text, but I highly recommend using it to everybody for whatever can. Emacs may not be the best tool for less technologically literate individuals (for this Atom or Sublime Text are very good), but the format is certainly very useful. I think people should look into using the command line more, as it can be much more productive after a period of learning.
Reading this gave me flashbacks. Horrible, horrible flashbacks.
I used to live in emacs - for years. Browsed the web with it, controlled music playback (via mpd) with it - everything. Nowadays, imo, a combination of Spotlight, tmux with a hotkey drop down terminal, Evernote, and JetBrains IDEs gets you 90% of the way there.
At some point you realize that work requires orders of magnitude more time thinking, reading, and communicating than it does typing. Optimizing your work environment for finger travel just doesn't make sense.
> Nowadays, imo, a combination of Spotlight, tmux with a hotkey drop down terminal, Evernote, and JetBrains IDEs gets you 90% of the way there.
The problem is that those are a pile of (both subtly & grossly) different tools, none of which integrate nearly as well with one another as different emacs modes do.
And of course, you are completely unable to extend any of those as you would with emacs.
> At some point you realize that work requires orders of magnitude more time thinking, reading, and communicating than it does typing.
Emacs improves thinking, reading & communicating just as much as it does typing. Having my data in a consistent, efficient format makes it easier to read, and consequently leaves me more time to think. Being able to read & write emails, send instant messages and use the web from within the same environment improves communication.
Emacs really is the bee's knees, and I've never used anything which comes close. If only there were a good mobile-centric port (tough, I know, but my idea is to make extensive use of command interactions)…
Mm, I don't actually see anything about finger travel in Josh's article. The main advantages he talks about are "no more context switching", "taking everything with you and keeping it forever", and that he likes being able to fullscreen emacs as a complete workflow with no external distractions. You have to admit, these are not as easily done with a multi-program, IDE-heavy workflow.
> I have a dual monitor set up at my desk. One of them is in portrait mode with Emacs full screened all day long. The other one has web browsers for researching and reading; it usually has a terminal open as well. I keep my calendar, email, etc., on another desktop in OS X, which is hidden while I'm in Emacs, and I keep all notifications turned off.
You don't need emacs to do this. Fullscreen a JetBrains IDE and install the Org4Idea plugin.
I beat the JetBrains drum a lot, but emacs/vi users don't realize how much functionality is integrated and keyboard-driven in their products - and, importantly, it's built-in (no plugins) and sanely pre-configured. "I thought only emacs could do this" was my reaction when I switched.
I think that the old joke about Emacs being an OS is actually very insightful. Living in Emacs is basically replacing most of your interactions with the OS (and in particular its window manager). Some, like me, find that Emacs as a pseudo-OS has a better approach towards productivity than your regular ones. It's opinionated - it encourages all "apps" (elisp scripts, basically) to conform the same text-oriented, fully customizable interaction patterns. And all powerful text-operating facilities of Emacs - navigation, searches, keyboard macros, etc. - can be used to interact with every "application". All the different modes and scripts in Emacs feel like a part of coherent whole, not separate apps. It reduces mental context switching tremendously.
You can get halfway there with a decent WM (xmonad, StumpWM and the like), but you still don't get the other half - unified and very powerful interaction, ability to tweak and instrument - and even combine together - applications, and documentation available at your fingertips. Living in Emacs makes me feel the computer is a powerful tool, not a toy.
What I mean is that most people can get most of what they need from something like org-mode by instead using Evernote, Asana, etc.
My experience is that I'd set up something like org-mode thinking, "wow, I can't wait to save hours a week by being able to juggle todo lists around at high speed without taking my fingers off the home row!" and like, that would just never be the case. In reality, all I needed was something a little bit better than a dumb text file.
ymmv. I'm sure there are power users out there who really exercise these tools to the max. But even then, I question how much time they're saving.
I'm not sure this is about finger travel. In my opinion it's more about consistency and features. Personally I spend most of the time on shells, interpreters and editing text, and I like the fact that the same key-bindings and basic operations work everywhere. For tasks that require little or no textual input, such as browsing the web or reading mail I do prefer GUIs though.
The best replacement I got to get on UNIX to compensate for the lack of IDEs I already knew from PC and Amiga worlds.
Having migrated to JVM and .NET worlds reduced my Emacs use to machines where no other option is available. (Vi is only an option when Emacs isn't available)
But what happens when your IDE is discontinued with no easy way to migrate projects? That has bit me several times over the last twenty years -- so I only rely on established proprietary tools like Emacs these days.
I feel that optimizing your work flow to minimize context switches is worthwhile, though. Doesn't have necessarily anything to do with one another but even getting your thoughts out without grabbing your mouse or mashing shift-right half a dozen times help me tremendously.
True, at one point you care about abstractions that makes editing support moot. That said I still enjoy a customizable input / render lisp thingy that doesn't require me to have a core i5. Maybe time for an emacs descendant. systemacs /jk
> If you like the new and shiny and want to get straight to work without much investment of time and mental cycles, it's likely not for you.
After I discovered Spacemacs, I somewhat disagree with this, because you get so much funcionality in a well thought package, you don't need much customization at first.
I was a bit surprised when I saw the link to the Nix package manager; it seemed rather out of context. I wonder if he just googled Nix and copy-pasted the first result?
Readit News
https://github.com/emacs-helm/helm
Ace Jump is pretty incredible. All editors and IDE's should be required to implement it. Here's a video demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZkpmegySnc
Easy Motion does the same thing in vim: http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=3526
The downside is that, sometimes, the hints are longer, but I've found it faster to know right away to type "wxyz" than to receive "w", "x", then "y" one at a time.
https://github.com/abo-abo/avy
https://github.com/abo-abo/swiper
Emacs searches not only ~/.emacs but also ~/.emacs.d/init.el (and probably more) places for its init file. So you don't have to mess around with symlinks, you can just have a synced folder that is your ~/.emacs.d and have init.el be at the top of that folder.
I say this as a dedicated, daily user of emacs and co-founder of a startup. Realistically it takes a year to get the hang of emacs to the point where you are more efficient in it than in other editors. The last thing I want my CEO (and friend and cofounder) doing is battling a weird Drop symlink issue with his .emacs file.
But I do agree that org-mode is amazing :)
The weird issues and workarounds are annoying, though.
Unfortunately there is a misconception that you need a 10kloc init.el to be productive. Worse still are the opinionated configurations targeted at newbs.
I think there is something to be said about using a few (if not one) text-centric tool to get stuff done: it's much lower on your cognitive load and wears you out less.
I use Evoluent at home and HP's 3-button mouse on the go (http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/oas/product-detail.html?oi...): while Evoluent is more ergonomic, it's too bulky to be portable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pydckb9ZU8Y
I used to live in emacs - for years. Browsed the web with it, controlled music playback (via mpd) with it - everything. Nowadays, imo, a combination of Spotlight, tmux with a hotkey drop down terminal, Evernote, and JetBrains IDEs gets you 90% of the way there.
At some point you realize that work requires orders of magnitude more time thinking, reading, and communicating than it does typing. Optimizing your work environment for finger travel just doesn't make sense.
The problem is that those are a pile of (both subtly & grossly) different tools, none of which integrate nearly as well with one another as different emacs modes do.
And of course, you are completely unable to extend any of those as you would with emacs.
> At some point you realize that work requires orders of magnitude more time thinking, reading, and communicating than it does typing.
Emacs improves thinking, reading & communicating just as much as it does typing. Having my data in a consistent, efficient format makes it easier to read, and consequently leaves me more time to think. Being able to read & write emails, send instant messages and use the web from within the same environment improves communication.
Emacs really is the bee's knees, and I've never used anything which comes close. If only there were a good mobile-centric port (tough, I know, but my idea is to make extensive use of command interactions)…
> I have a dual monitor set up at my desk. One of them is in portrait mode with Emacs full screened all day long. The other one has web browsers for researching and reading; it usually has a terminal open as well. I keep my calendar, email, etc., on another desktop in OS X, which is hidden while I'm in Emacs, and I keep all notifications turned off.
You don't need emacs to do this. Fullscreen a JetBrains IDE and install the Org4Idea plugin.
I beat the JetBrains drum a lot, but emacs/vi users don't realize how much functionality is integrated and keyboard-driven in their products - and, importantly, it's built-in (no plugins) and sanely pre-configured. "I thought only emacs could do this" was my reaction when I switched.
You can get halfway there with a decent WM (xmonad, StumpWM and the like), but you still don't get the other half - unified and very powerful interaction, ability to tweak and instrument - and even combine together - applications, and documentation available at your fingertips. Living in Emacs makes me feel the computer is a powerful tool, not a toy.
My experience is that I'd set up something like org-mode thinking, "wow, I can't wait to save hours a week by being able to juggle todo lists around at high speed without taking my fingers off the home row!" and like, that would just never be the case. In reality, all I needed was something a little bit better than a dumb text file.
ymmv. I'm sure there are power users out there who really exercise these tools to the max. But even then, I question how much time they're saving.
For me Emacs has always been a poor man's IDE.
The best replacement I got to get on UNIX to compensate for the lack of IDEs I already knew from PC and Amiga worlds.
Having migrated to JVM and .NET worlds reduced my Emacs use to machines where no other option is available. (Vi is only an option when Emacs isn't available)
Evernote has a hotkey for bringing up a note taking window.
OS X users can use Spotlight to bring up their favorite note taking app without touching a mouse.
After I discovered Spacemacs, I somewhat disagree with this, because you get so much funcionality in a well thought package, you don't need much customization at first.